XP Arcade: Captain Commando
If you've never played a beat 'em up with a baby riding mechanized power armor delivering jumping piledrivers to space ninjas, then you've never played Captain Commando.
This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
As has been written before, Final Fight didn’t invent beat ‘em ups, but it solidified the idea of what a beat ‘em up was supposed to be, and the rest of the industry took note. Capcom, the developers and publishers of Final Fight, would follow it up with not just sequels to the original game, but also plenty of other beat ‘em ups that used Final Fight’s basic rules and design, just in other contexts. Captain Commando, released in 1991, is easily one of the strangest of those successors, and that’s said as a compliment.
You probably read the subhed for this piece, so you already get the basic idea of how weird things get in Captain Commando. You’ve got four characters to choose from, and each is strange for one reason or another. The baby riding a power armor, we’ve got that one covered already, that explains itself. The titular Captain Commando has a head much too small for his body, and also his name is Captain Commando. He’s drawn like he had or is trying to get into a career as an F-Zero racer, and has a penchant for setting enemies on fire. There’s a comedically lanky alien dressed sort of like a mummy named Mack, and he’s nicknamed Mack the Knife because he wields knives. His hat is worn backwards, but you already knew that. Then there’s the ninja commando, Ginzu, but whatever. He’s a ninja, that’s pretty boring in a game where the commanding officer good guy sets people on fire all the time without anyone batting an eye, and there’s an alien dual-wielding knives who’s also prone to performing wrestling moves, and also a baby in a power armor who’s already seen plenty of professional wrestling themselves in their short life. Ooh, you’ve got a katana and you named it, how original.
In the arcade version of Captain Commando, four players can get in on the action simultaneously, which is chaotic, yes, but also the game is designed for that level of cooperation. Screens end up overflowing with foes, and while one person can take them down on their own, it’s probably going to cost them a bunch of quarters over the course of the game. It’s an entire beat ‘em up made out of the most stressful moments in Final Fight; backup is more than appreciated, it’s nearly required at some points. The bosses, especially, were designed with the idea that they’d be focusing in on one character, while others attack them from behind. That, or you have to be basically perfect at being where the projectiles they fire are not, while also dodging flying dropkicks that close the distance between you in a flash.
Like with Final Fight, there are boxes full of temporary weapons and health-restoring food items, as well as items with no other point than for increasing your score. You have a special attack, but successfully causing damage with it will also use up some of your health — it’s still worth using, the thing is just that you have to be strategic about it, and save it for the moments where not using it will cost you even more health, because you end up attacked or pinballed back-and-forth between enemies or whatever, instead of just doing a big spin with Mack to escape.
One thing worth considering, too, is that, because you’re temporarily invincible when you deploy your special, you can use it as essentially an evade button: you won’t lose health while using your special so long as you don’t hit any enemies with it. So, spin away from enemies with Mack’s special to dodge projectiles, or use the baby’s release of explosives as a way to let acid hurled at you by one of the foes pass right through, and so on: it takes practice to time it right while not also causing damage, but it’s a beat ‘em up. The whole thing is practicing not getting hit and timing.
What Captain Commando does differently than Final Fight, other than the character differences being wackier, is an improved setting. You end up in significantly different places, since it’s set in the same universe as Final Fight, sure, but in the future, allowing for far more sci-fi influence. You start out in a city — Metro City, naturally — but you end up in space by the end, taking down the enemy leader of the Super Criminals, known as Scumocide. Score one for the nominative determinism folks.
Hilariously, Scumocide and his crew have the ability to hang out in space and create an army of biomutant soldiers, but they’re also just going after Metro City, not the world as a whole, at least as far as the in-game storytelling goes. You’re thanked after defeating Scumocide for finally freeing the city from the terror of these super criminals with their superpowers, which implies that’s the mayor thanking you for your service here. Then again, these guys end up defeated by a baby, so maybe setting their sights on just a city to start was an understanding of their own limitations.
There’s only so much to say about Captain Commando’s actual gameplay: if you’re into Final Fight or this specific style and era of beat ‘em ups, then you’re going to also like this game. It does the things you’d expect it to do, with the special attacks sharing Final Fight’s rule system, and the ability to grab enemies and perform a number of direction-based maneuvers on them afterward. That’s where a baby delivering piledrivers comes from. You can also tap forward twice to dash, which allows for a different kind of powerful attack from each character, as well: that’s where Captain Commando’s commitment to setting enemies on fire comes from.
You will definitely want to play multiplayer, however, with at least one other person, but again, you can play with up to four. At least, in the arcade version, you can: the port to the SNES, like Final Fight’s port(s) before it, is limited. At least it has multiplayer at all, unlike that game — you’re just held back to two players there, since, frankly, one player is more than the game can handle. There’s obvious slowdown and jankiness even when you play the SNES port single-player, and that’s with the volume of enemies significantly reduced, just like in Final Fight.
It’s fine in this format, in the sense it’s far more playable than Final Fight’s port was, but it’s nothing special in this form. The chaos is gone, as is the difficulty, and the ability to do things like stealing and riding a power armor while playing as a baby already riding a power armor is gone, since those ridable power armors have been removed from the game. Along with, unsurprisingly, some of the exposed skin on women enemies, and some of the game’s gore found in the arcade version, as well. It’s a tame port, in multiple ways, but hey, at least they didn’t remove the women entirely like with Final Fight on the SNES. Sorry, Poison, your shorts were simply too short for America. Which seems pretty un-American given this is the country of Daisy Dukes, but whatever.
The Playstation port did a better job of replicating the arcade experience, even allowing for four players with a controller adapter and a password, but you don’t need to worry about that so much in the present, where Captain Commando is available in multiple forms. You can get it as part of the Capcom Beat ‘Em Up collection, or through Capcom Arcade Stadium. It doesn’t have the legacy of Final Fight, no, and it’s a serious challenge to get through solo, but it’s tons of goofy fun with friends, and you don’t even have to feed actual quarters in whenever you run out of lives, which is probably going to happen even if you brought a small army with you to take on Scumocide.
Captain Commando — the character, not the game — has a bit of a funny history, since he existed prior to the game. Captain Commando, as you probably picked up on yourself, is named that way because… wait for it… CapCom. He was a mascot for NES and Commodore 64 releases by Capcom, with games like 1942 and Mega Man included as part of the Captain Commando Challenge Series, so his likeness was found on the packaging for those titles. Getting him his own game in a goofy future version of Metro City is a pretty good gag, really, and it’s a bonus that the game is as fun as it is to go with it.
Captain Commando would end up as a playable fighter in Marvel vs. Capcom and Marvel vs. Capcom 2, and both he and enemies from the beat ‘em up made appearances in multiple crossover titles, like SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters’ Clash, Namco x Capcom, and Project X Zone 2, the latter of which includes not just Namco and Capcom characters and worlds, but also those of Nintendo and Sega. We’re probably not going to see a Captain Commando revival anytime soon, or ever, but we don’t really need one, either. All of these kinds of beat ‘em ups from Capcom were just different flavors of Final Fight that were able to experiment in some ways that a relatively grounded series like that one wasn’t going to do. And that’s great, but it was very of a time, too.
Now, if Capcom wants to make a 3D brawler with a piledriving baby to revive the God Hand-style of absurdity, well. They should do that. Until then, pick up Capcom Arcade Stadium and use Mack the Knife to put holes in mutant criminals, or set them on fire with Captain Commando, or pick them up and throw them into other enemies as a baby. The world’s your really weird oyster, so long as you don’t choose the guy whose deal is just “is ninja.”
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